MoonPay Acquires Dawn Labs, Launches AI Trading Copilot for Prediction Markets

In brief

• MoonPay acquired AI trading startup Dawn Labs and launched Dawn CLI.
• The platform turns plain-English trading prompts into automated trading strategies.
• MoonPay said the product launches first with support for Polymarket.

MoonPay is expanding further into AI-powered cryptocurrency infrastructure with the acquisition of Dawn Labs, a startup building autonomous trading tools for prediction markets and digital asset traders.

The crypto payments company said Monday that it acquired the applied research lab and launched Dawn CLI, an AI-native trading product designed to let users build and execute trading strategies using natural language prompts. (Disclosure: MoonPay Ventures is an investor in Dastan, the parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt.)

“Until now, building and running a systematic trading strategy required you to be a developer, a quant, and a portfolio manager,” Dawn Labs founder and Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs Neeraj Prasad told Decrypt. “Dawn collapses that into a single interface. You describe what you want in plain English, and the system handles the code and execution.”

The launch comes as prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi see sizable growth, attracting traders betting on elections, sports, economic indicators, and geopolitical events. The growth of those markets has increased demand for tools that can analyze information, automate trades, and react quickly across multiple platforms.

“We’re starting with prediction markets because they are one of the fastest-growing sectors, and many traders in the space are underserved by existing tooling,” Prasad said.

Prasad said the platform will launch initially with support for Polymarket, with plans to expand to additional trading venues and asset types in the coming months.

The move reflects a broader push across crypto and fintech to build AI agents capable of interacting directly with financial systems. In April, cryptocurrency exchange Gemini launched an agentic trading feature for AI agents, while Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon recently launched AI stablecoin payment rails, and Solana and Google did much the same.

While AI has increasingly become a part of the cryptocurrency landscape, Prasad said MoonPay does not view AI agents and human users as separate customer bases: The tech is designed to work for traders of all sorts.

“We've been building MoonPay around four pillars: fund, tokenize, trade, and spend,” he said. “Our agentic products put that same stack in the hands of AI agents. Each one makes it easier for both humans and agents to move value. Dawn is the latest example. A human sets the strategy, and the agent executes it.”

The rise of autonomous trading agents has raised concerns about hallucinated strategies, unintended trades, and execution failures, particularly as AI systems begin handling real capital.

Prasad said Dawn addresses those risks through non-custodial wallets created locally through the Open Wallet Standard, a reviewable strategy code that users can inspect before deployment, along with policy controls that limit how much an agent can trade, which markets it can access, and how positions are sized.

The news also comes as MoonPay pushes further into AI-focused infrastructure. In recent months, the company has launched an open-source wallet standard for AI agents, introduced a stablecoin debit card for autonomous AI models, and acquired crypto key management firm Sodot as part of a broader institutional expansion.

“The team at Dawn Labs have made the most complex parts of active trading accessible to anyone with an idea,” MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said in a statement. “With Dawn, AI agents can develop and execute sophisticated trading strategies autonomously. That is what this next chapter of MoonPay is about.”

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